Some thoughts the morning after

 The golden age of blogging roughly coincided with the last Parliament when the Conservatives were in opposition. Blogs played a role in the party debate as it sought to work out the direction to go in. After that other media took over but now seems a good time to put fingers to keys once more with some early thoughts on where the Conservatives go from here.

It is possible to win the 2029 general election

Many may think that statement is ridiculous. But politics has become ever more volatile. After multiple recent elections the commentary has declared one major party smashed up and heading for inevitable oblivion whilst the other is seemingly set to dominate politics for decades to come – only for the next election to turn all that on its head and see the pattern inverted. If the Conservatives get their act together quickly, sort out the many problems that have beset them and make the right pitch to the country then it is quite possible to overturn Labour’s majority – their vote is not that high after all.

It is possible 2024 could be only a stepping stone to the party falling even further

In 1923 the Liberal Party won 159 seats. The following year, one hundred years ago, it fell to just 40 seats. Since then it has never won more than at most 72 seats at any election. It is a salutary reminder how a party can fall suddenly and rapidly.

There is a real danger this could happen to the Conservatives, especially if the party gets self-indulgent, talks to itself, pursues core vote strategies, continues to alienate people and slides into irrelevancy. The party must recognise this danger and void it.

This is not Canada in the 1990s

During the campaign with all the doom and gloom there was renewed interest in the 1993 Canadian general election when a new leader took the Progressive Conservatives from majority government to just two seats, with a new challenger on the right called Reform. Many have been privately relieved to have not fallen so far. The subsequent eventual fate of the Progressive Conservatives may seem alluring. They fought two further elections against Reform (or the Canadian Alliance as it became in 2000) before merging with them in 2003 after a long campaign to “Unite the Right”. But one can’t simply pick stretches of political history and assume all one has to do is copy what happened in another country. For starters by the time a merger happened several key figures were no longer in leadership.

A merger with Reform UK and/or a Nigel Farage leadership is not the answer

There are already knee-jerk calls for mergers and many wishing Farage would become the next Conservative leader. This would just transfer all the problems with Farage to the Conservatives. The man is politically toxic amongst the many voters we need to regain. He is also not leadership material. Each of his previous leaderships has seen him lose parliamentarians. He proved unable to sort out Ukip to make it a smoothly functioning organisation. His current party may be a party (the “Reform UK Ltd” jibe is annoying – lots of parties have company registrations for operational purposes) but it is a top down brand based around the leader with no real structure or democracy. Farage is an airwave politician, making his point through media. Time and again he has shown himself incapable of building a grassroots party operation, instead just making noise. Such is his political toxicity that Leavers had to do everything they could to make sure he did not get control of the official Leave campaign in the referendum. There is nothing to suggest he would be an asset to the Conservative Party, whether electorally or organisationally. Instead he would be political poison.

Now is not the time to be selecting a candidate for Prime Minister in 2029

We have just suffered a bruising defeat. The party needs to sort out a lot of organisation and have a proper debate about its direction. Even the method of how to chose the leader has come under renewed attention. To simply enter a contest for a long-term leader right now and try to filter all the questions through just two candidates whittled down by MPs would be chaotic. Instead we need a caretaker leadership to sort out the party internally.

There is an obvious, qualified candidate for this. A person who sits in a seat that has long-term swung heavily against the party and had a slender majority in 2019. But instead of bowing out they chose to stand by the maxim it is better to be a loser than a quitter. They know what it’s like to be leader. It is time for the party to conscript as its interim leader Iain Duncan Smith.

(Footnote: For those wondering when the Liberals won 72 seats, I’m counting the combined total for the three Liberal factions in 1931. The looser nature of parties in the era makes it hard to determine just when some groups stopped being an organised faction that took disputes to the electorate and became a separate political party.)